With officials ruling out agreement in Busan on key financial and regulatory reforms, including a mooted global bank levy, the need to strike the right balance between trimming deficits and sustaining economic growth will take centre stage. “Countries with high budget deficits need to make sure they can deal with those deficits,” Britain’s finance minister, George Osborne, said in Beijing before flying to Busan.US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the need to get the balance right was a “shared imperative” recognized by all G20 members. “As the IMF says, we want those fiscal reforms to happen in a way that’s growth-friendly,” Geithner told reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
 Minister Babacan represents Turkey Economy Minister Ali Babacan left Turkey for South Korea on Thursday to attend a G-20 ministers meeting. Major issues to be addressed at the two-day meeting in Busan include recovery of the global economy; a G-20 framework for strong, sustainable and balanced growth; finance sector regulatory reform; and international financial institutions as relating to global financial safety nets. Babacan is expected to return to Turkey on Monday. G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meetings, established in 1999, systemically bring together important industrialized and developing economies to discuss key issues in the global economy. Ankara Today’s Zaman |
G20 nations to date have merely discussed the timing of unwinding the super-loose monetary and fiscal policies they launched to cushion the crisis, but the Bank of Canada on Tuesday became the first G7 nation to raise its key interest rate.
The G20, the premier international economic policy coordination forum, brings together the world’s systemically important rich economies and emerging markets. Together they account for 85 percent of global output. Anxious to soothe global markets, the group is expected to back the euro zone’s deficit-cutting strategy, even though China and Brazil fret that the bloc has not acted more decisively.
